Restaurant and cafe table tops in Friern Barnet

Yes. Friern Barnet is on the patch, and the postcodes we work here are N11. It is worked on our north London run, along with the rest of Barnet. Plenty of zones run at the weekend as well as through the week, so a Saturday date is not automatically the easier one to work. A table order comes off the van as a stack of frames and a pallet of bases, and both of those need somewhere to stand before either is moved. A whole order comes off in one movement wherever it can. We come to the kitchen to template and again to fit, so there is nothing to visit and nothing to collect.

Half-landings mean the back of the house sits at a slightly different level from the front, and a knocked-through kitchen crosses that line. The commercial frontage on streets like these is a narrow shop with the dining room running back from the pavement, so the tops go in past furniture that is already down. A shell unit is drawn before it is measured. Sill height gets settled with the template on site, because it is one of the few dimensions nobody has measured before we arrive. None of that is scribed against on a table, since it stands clear of every wall, so the awkwardness moves from the back edge to the floor and the base. Room by room, since no two of them are the same.

A height barrier on the car park entrance rules out a tail-lift van outright, and the stone then transfers to a trolley at the barrier itself. Tops travel upright in a padded frame, and it is the frame rather than the person carrying it that has to clear the tightest turn. Wrapping stays on until the pedestal is standing. A permit covering the street is permission to park rather than a space reserved on it, and on a full street the difference is the whole morning. The bases are the heavy half of the delivery, so the pallet is dealt with first while there are still hands free for it. The bases are the heavy pallet, not the tops.

Not particularly, and it would be easy to pretend otherwise. What the research on this patch actually lists is worktop templating, worktop replacement and worktop installation. That is a point about the buildings round here, not about the job. The quoting, the cutting and the fitting are identical here to anywhere else we work. Kitchens go in near the end of a conversion, behind the plastering and the flooring, by which point the programme has already absorbed whatever slipped earlier. Table work arrives as a batch by its nature, and a batch means one slab run rather than the same colour ordered twice a year apart. Match it now or hunt for it later. Studio and one-bed conversions put the whole kitchen against a single wall, so the job is one run and everything depends on that one length. Where an operator changes hands the bases usually stay, so a refit becomes a resurface and the saving comes from what is already bolted down. A trial piece before a large order is money well spent.

A doorway partway along one wall breaks that side into two separate pieces, and two short pieces cost more between them than the single long one they replace. What decides the cut list here is the seating plan rather than the room shape, and one repeated table size nests far better than six one-offs. Offcuts from a counter become the smaller pieces. The stone is £110 to £550 per square metre supply only, and templating, fabrication and fitting are quoted separately.

A window board sitting below finished worktop height leaves two choices, drop the top under it or notch the stone around it, and both cost more than a straight run. Where a floor falls away, the levelling is done by winding out the feet under each base rather than by packing anything under the stone. Nothing is scribed, because nothing meets a wall. Send the seating plan with the gangway widths marked, and bring in one of the bases or the maker’s drawing so the bolt centres can be measured properly. Whoever manages the block controls the lift booking, the bin store and the visitor parking, and none of that sits in the gift of the household whose kitchen it is. A table top bolted to a base you already own is loose furniture rather than a fixture, so it leaves with the operator at the end of a term. Sign-off covers shape, edge, drilling and count.

Undermount bowls are cut and polished in the workshop and dry-fitted to the stone on the bench before anything is loaded. We seat and seal the sink and hob on the day; water, waste, gas and electrics are for your plumber and electrician. The tap hole is drilled in the workshop too, and its position depends on how far the tap has to swing. Handles on opposing runs meet in the middle of the aisle, so a deep edge profile specified on both sides takes width out of the standing space twice over. Rounds waste the corners of their blank where squares do not, so the mix of shapes moves the slab count more than the number of covers does. A set is laid out together before anything is wrapped.

Granite tells you when the seal wants topping up: water stops beading on the surface and starts darkening it instead. The bead where the sink and hob meet the stone is siliconed rather than sealed, and wants watching. Quartz carries resin, so a hot pan wants a trivet, while granite and sintered stone will take one without complaint. The original larder or store cupboard usually survives in a corner, and that alcove is deeper than the units and squarer than the walls around it. A unit in an old parade rarely has rear access, which means every top and every base comes through the front door in the order it will be set out. Flats above set the hours the work can happen in.

Grooves are machined into the surface rather than applied to it, so there is nothing to come loose later. The bowl position has to be settled before templating, since the grooves are set out from it. The grooves sit inside the depth of the top with stone left either side, so a shallow run limits them. There is usually a step down into the back addition, so the kitchen floor and the hall floor are not the same level and neither of them is flat. Table tops sit outside all of that, because a top touches no wall at all and every one of its edges is profiled, polished and on show. The underside matters, because a hand goes under every edge.

The fit follows 5 to 10 working days after the template, and nothing is cut before that visit because nothing is cut from a plan. Upstands and splashbacks are templated after the worktop is down and settled, so they are a separate visit. The same firm templates and fits. Nobody else is brought in to install. Sash windows sit low in the rear wall, and the sill often lands below the height a worktop wants to run past. What a table top needs from us is a size, a shape and the base plate it has to be drilled to, and very little else. The bases stay yours and only the surface changes.